Your disaster recovery recommendations

[SenseiSteve]

Way too many web hosting clients continue to view RAID configurations as disaster recovery solutions. While different RAID levels do address redundancy and performance factors, they are NOT disaster recovery solutions. Murphy’s Law says that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong – and at the most inopportune time.

The key to effective disaster recovery solutions is backing up your mission critical data REMOTELY and then testing the restore function to ensure that you’ll be able to bring everything back up in a timely fashion.

What do you recommend for backups and how often should you backup your data? Let's say an operation room at a hospital needs immediate (hot) backups - what would your solution entail?

 

[bigredseo]

Monthly - Regular websites that have weekly or monthly blog updates
Weekly - Regular website with daily blog posts
Daily - ECommerce type websites
12/6 hrs - busier ECommerce sites
Hourly or less - database only backups for really busy ECommerce sites

Once we get into mission-critical sites, it's beyond my scope level with existing clients, but I would assume a multi-cloud configuration, load balancers, 5-minute or less database push syncs, etc.

Testing has to be done weekly on most backups, and probably a lot more frequently than that when we start talking about hospitals and emergency services.

We worked with an eCommerce client years ago that every time a purchase was made, it pushed that modification to a different database at a different data center. If they had a critical failure, they would be able to restore their normal backup, then push the modification (incremental type backup) to be back 100%.

We've worked with a dental office that still uses paper for EVERYTHING and then reception staff logs it to the system throughout the day. While not an instant backup, they can easily gain access to everything should they have any kind of power failure or corruption in a day.

 

[SLWMicro]

We leave the backup system entirely to the customer, but in case of an extraordinary situation, I take every possibility into account and back up to the remote server, and for this I use Google and yandex.

 

[brijeshm]

Regular backups are important for any disaster recovery

But it is also important to make number of copies in different places for easy recovery.

 

[ibtisam_mib]

Effective solutions involve remote backups and regular testing of the restore function to ensure quick recovery. For critical data, implement automated daily backups, incremental backups for frequent updates, and full backups for comprehensive protection. Prioritize security and perform periodic disaster recovery drills to verify the reliability of your backup strategy.